How to improve WordPress speed and performance – RianGraphics

WordPress is one of the most used cms’s of the whole World Wide Web. I’ll teach you how to improve WordPress speed, as you know a slow website will never get high ranks. Here you will find out how to improve your site’s speed and get all the benefits from WordPress platform.

The most annoying experience you can provide to a visitor on your website is a slow page load time. How many times while you’re searching for something on Google and the best result takes 5 to 10 seconds to load? It happens all the time it’s granted. For a better user experience, we all should care about providing a better page load time for our’s end users. It will definitely help your ranks, maximize your bounce rate and view time, your users will spend more time viewing content on your website. Just think a moment about it, if your page responds quickly in off, the user will be less annoyed. Your users will definitely stay more to learn about what you do or sell on the web. Your conversion rate will blast and more money will come.

Try to focus on improving the page load time and response. Don’t let your users leave your awesome pages, just because of such an issue so easy to fix. WordPress has a long list of valid solutions for this type of problem. It can be easily fixed by just installing some plugins in your WordPress Installation. Remind that for a full fix you need to go a bit further. Tweaking a little bit with some options and touch a bit of your template code.

If you want to know how to improve WordPress speed keep reading

Here’s a list of bad practice for speed when building a Web page:

Too many Http requests (try to make just a few Http requests on your Web pages Http requests are everything your page need to be rendered like stylesheet files, javascript files, image files, font files. When possible combine them together, this way you will have fewer Http requests)

Too big files (avoid big images and script files, they will take a lot of time to be downloaded and as result your page will be very slow, for images try to save them with Web resolution the file size will be very tiny, minify your scripts and load your videos in external platforms like YouTube)

Gzip module disabled (Gzip is an apache module that compresses your files for the browser, Gzip is a very powerful tool to make your site faster. You’ll notice a big difference in your page speed if Gzip is ON)

Cache system disabled (enabling a Cache system and defining the right expiring time will help you page load very fast if you already visited that page. The cache saves for you all the files a Web page need to be rendered, doing that the second time a user visit that page he already has those files on his computer and the page will flash in a second)

Javascript and CSS above the fold (while a page is being rendered it starts reading your HTML file from top to bottom, the browser start the process of downloading all files in that order and it doesn’t render anything anti those files has been downloaded. Try to put this big js and CSS files in your footer this way the user will start seeing something instead of a blank page)

Use of images when not needed (do not make use of images when isn’t necessary CSS is a better solution in many cases)

Good practices when you trying to improve WordPress speed

Let’s see what’s a good practice in terms of page speed optimization. Knowing what’s bad, you agree with me that is pretty easy to guess what’s good practice:

Less Http requests are gold in terms of page speed optimization. Having just a few Http requests is your first goal to archive. Your browser will love your pages and page delivery will be fairly faster.

Optimize your images for the Web (resize your images based on your layout don’t oversize it. If you have a little 100×80 pixels image box, resize your image.
With that same parameter do not load an image 10 times bigger. Here some good parameters to keep in mind when saving an image for the Web.
Keep your dpi at “72” this is the best quality value, your images should be like 1024px width, don’t oversize if not needed)

Combine and minify your CSS and js files (this way you’ll have fewer Http requests and save lot of bytes)

Activate Gzip compression (this is mandatory Gzip will bless your pages with the power of file compression. You just need to activate it Gzip will take care of the rest)

Enable a good cache system (Cache will optimize your pages, saving your files in the browser cache.
This way all your returning visitors will have better experience and pages will load faster)

Move all your CSS and scripts at the bottom of the page.
Doing that your page will be rendered while those blocking files are being downloaded and your visitors won’t leave your pages at the very first 2 seconds).

Minify HTML to save even more bytes

Don’t use images when not needed (instead of a flat gray background image, use CSS. Don’t use an image for every icon. You may need put them together and create a font file and so on)

OK now the good part of improving WordPress speed

We covered some of the bad and good practice. Let’s take care of how you actually can improve your WordPress pages performance.

In the WordPress repository, there are many plugins to help you in all kind of aspects of how to improve WordPress speed. Let’s see which ones you can count on.